Offering listeners insights, stories, and guided imagery, Gil Fronsdal describes the idea of the self as an anchor.
This recording from the Insight Meditation Center was originally published on Dharmaseed.org
My sense of who I was, my joy of life, my joy in myself, was so dependent on who I was comparing myself to. That’s a fragile way to live, that’s a heavy anchor to carry around with you.” – Gil Fronsdal
This week on the BHNN Guest Podcast, Gil teaches us about:
- Ideas of the self as an anchor
- The three characteristics of inconstancy, suffering, and not-self
- The Buddha’s views on the self
- How thinking about the self actually takes us away from the self
- Staying with the flow in meditation
- The suffering found within ‘me, myself, and mine’
- A dharma story about zen master Suzuki Roshi
- How most concepts are based on relationship and comparison
- The pain in basing our joy off of the comparison to others
- Conventions, constructs, and rules
- Becoming wise to the projections of the mind
- Trusting the practice
“The purpose of this deep meditation is to help us to become free, help us to lift up the anchors so we’re not held back, not limited, so we don’t set ourselves up to be washed over by the floods that come.” – Gil Fronsdal
About Gil Fronsdal:
Gil Fronsdal is the co-teacher for the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California; he has been teaching since 1990. He has practiced Zen and Vipassana in the U.S. and Asia since 1975. He was a Theravada monk in Burma in 1985, and in 1989 began training with Jack Kornfield to be a Vipassana teacher. Gil teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center where he is part of its Teachers Council. Gil was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982, and in 1995 received Dharma Transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. He currently serves on the SF Zen Center Elders’ Council. In 2011 he founded IMC’s Insight Retreat Center. Gil has an undergraduate degree in agriculture from U.C. Davis where he was active in promoting the field of sustainable farming. In 1998 he received a PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University studying the earliest developments of the bodhisattva ideal. He is the author of The Issue at Hand, essays on mindfulness practice; A Monastery Within; a book on the five hindrances called Unhindered; and the translator of The Dhammapada, published by Shambhala Publications. You may listen to Gil’s talks on Audio Dharma.